


Wire in the Blood

by x_los



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 13:55:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2470634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her father is a mountain, and her mother is dead. A grim AU coda to “Her Walking Clothes”.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wire in the Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Her Walking Clothes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2470565) by [x_los](https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los). 



Title: Wire in the Blood

Author: x_los

Beta: aralias

Word Count:

Rating: PG

Pairings: Basil/Ratigan, OC, Dawson

Summary: Her father is a mountain, and her mother is dead. A grim AU coda to “Her Walking Clothes”.

 

 

Hybrid pregnancies are notoriously difficult, and Basil's first baby comes relatively late--courting Basil, convincing her, having taken years. The best years of Ratigan's life. Still, he lavishes care on her, takes obsessive precautions. Basil's fame and service to the realm ensure that both Dawson, the great friend of Basil's last years and her sometime-biographer, and the Queen's own personal physician attend her confinement. It is almost the turn of the century, and childbed death is increasingly rare. Thus, precautions aside, Ratigan is wholly unprepared.

The royal physician is a sane man, and terrified to tell him. They let him discover it for himself--showing him in without a word to Basil's childbed. Her bright, intelligent eyes are glassy with pain, and she is far, far away. She never recovers enough to recognize him, or to properly look at the child. Basil, of all people, dies whimpering. Her husband's grief is profound, more mad than not. He is not the sort of man who anyone can reach or comfort. That was Basil's office, and it is empty now.

Dawson is a former army man, and he is the only one brave and stubborn enough to suggest to the widower, after several days, that he should look at the child. Give it some name.

"Mara," Ratigan suggests nastily. Dawson harrumphs and sensibly rejects this suggestion. The mouse tries to put his foot down and insist Ratigan buck up and pay _some_ attention to the responsibilities that remain in the wake of--of her death (and even Dawson's voice stumbles feebly over that).

Ratigan simply growls at Dawson and slams the door of his bedroom in Dawson's face. They have never been friends, neither really understanding how Basil could stand the other, and in her absence no tie binds the two men together. Ratigan had always resented the memoirs keenly--Dawson’s ‘Basil’ was never quite right, never quite the woman he knew. There she was, preserved in amber, subtly _wrong_. Quite like the child, really.

Ratigan does look in on it, once.

He remembers how Basil hadn't wanted it--not like he had. She had let herself fall pregnant, more than anything, to please him. She had, by the end of her life, loved him in a terrible, quiet way that pressed at her heart and which she could hardly bear to express. Yet she was driven to expression, as though the pressure threatened to choke her if she didn't try. So she spoke to him with bluff fondness, and then performed conspicuous feats-- _tours de force_ of attention, extravagant gifts presented as trifles. Her displays of devotion and respect had been outlandish, outside the bounds of appropriate conduct. He'd adored her for it.

She had tried to give him this, and his memories of creating the child, of worshiping her as the parasite grew within her, choke him with bile now. He loathes the sight of the writhing, crying little thing, the half-rat abomination that has broken his wife, and he knows he can never live peaceably with it.

He sends it up to Basil's people nameless, and it eventually falls to a scandalized, grieving David Dawson to name it for the Queen.

"Basil would be ashamed of you," Dawson writes sternly. Ratigan laughs at the letter and goes back to his dull, pointless life of spilling out cold, perfect calculations. If Basil would come back for a moment just to spit on him, he would perform any task, concoct any scheme, commit any depravity. Gladly. Twice.

He descends to the country and sees the child a few times a year, only for a couple of days on each occasion. She is quick and ready, and picks up from him that she is not to embrace him, is barely to speak to him. One year, when he overhears her speaking to other people, he realizes with a start that she has somehow, in the woman's absence, picked up Basil's expressions. That shrug of dismissal for praise insufficiently earned is Basil's, and that sideways look of quick annoyance is incandescently, unmistakably Basil’s. Ratigan resents the child as a pretender to the throne. Still, he subsequently bestirs himself to take a slight interest in her education, and her tutors are replaced with graduates known to him personally, who send him monthly dispatches on their educational program.

Young and alone in the country, seemingly the only child for miles, the girl learns Latin. Learns enough maths and deductive reasoning to puzzle through her parents' published works and to submit questions to her tutors. Dawson visits every few months, and the highlights of her life are when she's allowed to come down to London to visit him--to be among people.

She's a strange, difficult child, with a wit so quick and piercing, so prescient, that the maids find her uncomfortable to be around and avoid her. She’s also moody, with the seeds of a monstrous temper. She is small and dark, with rattish hints about her. She wears gloves out of season and favors styles that hide her tell-tale tail. One day she will look striking, but now she looks impossible, uncomfortable in her body. She loves machines and her mother's adventures. Something about her expressions suggests that she could be buoyant, gregarious and amusing if given anything like a chance. But above all she is hungry--desperately lonely, eager to please without having the slightest idea of how to do so. _Feral_ , Dawson thinks guiltily when she visits and sits among his own brood like a raven among the pigeons.

Once, when she is nine, her father comes up for Christmas day, steel gray and huge. He seems to her a sublime mountain of hatred. He is about as festive as a dead dog. They are alone after dinner, him reading by the fire, her fidgeting.

"Would you love _me_ , if I were dead too?" she screws herself up to ask him, calculatingly blank-eyed and seemingly fearless. She believes the only safety is in learning to hate Father rather than wishing he could tolerate her, and she is practicing.

He laughs without putting his book down. "Well, you certainly aren't a bastard." She does, quite literally, have his claws.

She tells herself she feels enormous contempt for him--for the weakness of his perpetual mourning and for his coward’s withdrawal from the world. Does he think he’s Hamlet? The late Queen? _Pathetic,_ surely, to be so irresponsible. So incapable of coping with a common loss.

This idea of him lasts the long spells between his visits; his actual presence destroys the construction. Her father is many things, but he is not a pathetic man. When he’s gone she has to rebuild her edifice, painstakingly.

It falls to poor Dawson, whom she learns to charm, to tell her the story of her parents' romance (to the extent he knows it), and to blushingly hint at why she was born not, in fact, prematurely, and yet not very long after her parents' wedding. He of course gives no details whatsoever, and it is left to her to deduce what her mother was trying to prove, demanding her lover demonstrate that he wanted this before she agreed to marry him.

Dawson says her father used to be a capering sort of fellow, insufferably delighted with himself and the world and always, especially, with her mother. She cannot even imagine it, and she certainly doesn't believe it.

She attends university after the war--her mother's college, at Cambridge. Not at Oxford, where she might run into her father. She avoids even their bops and the boat race like the plague--she'd crumble, if she ran into him. It wouldn't matter if he were old now--if his hands were less titanic than they were in her memory, if the great mountain of his back had subsided into a hunch. Confronted with him like that, she'd turn into a pillar of salt, right there on the lawn, even as she was being haughtily informed by some groundskeeper that the privileges of the green did not extend to ladies, ma'am.

Her performance astounds the dons, and, with a little help from her uncle, her rise through the Civil Service is meteoric. Ironically it is her father's perfect calculations, which she has always kept up with, via journals, that enable her to make a truly staggering leap in computational technology. Rows of female computers become rows of female programmers as her instinct for engineering and systems becomes a defense computer, rooms and rooms long, that she can walk through and touch: the spider at the center of a tingling web that extends in all directions. Her father gets knighted for his substantial intellectual contribution to it all, and she thinks he only shows up out of some lingering sense of irony.

She can't avoid the ceremony altogether. She knows she'll be given a life peerage of her own, in the not-too-distant future. Order of the Garter, if she's lucky--however that can be defined. She’ll die a Baroness, perhaps. Her work has prolonged the life of the Empire by at least a century, and she knows the chemical composition of every type of wire in her machine and how to build it in the bare wilderness and how to calculate every computation by hand should it break, but she does not know how to feel about that, or, anymore, about the rat who slowly crosses the room, moving inexorably towards her, bearing down on her. She tries to avoid him, and doesn't quite manage it. As much as he's always intimidated her, it's still strange to see him like this--walking with a heavy cane, still powerful and imposing, but clearly at the twilight of his life.

"Sir," she addresses him with her own measure of polite irony.

"Miss Nest-Ratigan," he returns, catching and matching her tone. The way he does it is a little--funny? Perhaps Dawson is right, and he was funny once. She looks at him and tries to find in the hard, grief-carved hugeness of his face the alternate father he might have been if her mother had lived, or if he'd ever allowed himself to be consoled for the loss of what people say was perhaps the brightest mind and spirit of her generation. Perhaps he thought consolation an insult to Basil's memory. He was a master criminal once, they say--though what _that_ even means, she has no idea. ‘Tamed by the love of a woman’, _they say_. She snorts. Call this tamed? Broken, maybe. Hollowed out. Left angrier, obviously angrier, than anyone else she's ever known. The world has cheated him, and he is rancor, and he is wormwood.

She knows he's Irish, really, but she can't hear it, not at _all_ , and she wonders if he's--ashamed of it?

Beneath the cold, inflexible sneer, it is a mobile face. The eyes are lit with undeniable brilliance. She _can_ see it, through a glass, darkly--the father who developed her mind in person rather than at several degrees' remove--the one with wicked stories and ready sympathy, who protected her fiercely. In a way she's always been able to see him, and that's made everything worse. Maybe they're alike, he and she. Maybe she's allowed to think he killed her mother and hate him, too. Maybe she refuses to be consoled.

With a curt nod of acknowledgement, she turns away.

Miss Nest-Ratigan attends her father's meager funeral in businesslike fashion (that, she realizes, was what he’d thought to tell her at the ceremony--ah, well). She has a long, impeccable, celebrated career. She never marries, because she's damned if she'll be either of them.

 


End file.
